The Democrats were confident that they would sweep Donald Trump away. Instead, they suffered a devastating defeat. Now they are trying to figure out what happened. And they seem to be having second thoughts about woke ideology.
The first reaction was dumbfounded grief and panic about the dystopia to come. I’m pretty sure Schadenfreude is a vice. (We are supposed to “Rejoice with those who rejoice” and “weep with those who weep,” not rejoice with those who weep [Romans 12:15].) But I have to share this, not to mock the emotion but for its excruciating irony. The Atlantic‘s David Frum lamented, “As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.”
Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.
Now he knows how conservatives feel! We have been saying exactly the same thing for decades!
Then came the blame game. Some claimed it was Harris’s fault. More claimed it was Biden’s fault. Some claimed it was the Democratic National Committee’s fault in not letting other candidates run against Biden in the primaries. Others blamed the American people.
Finally, though, came the more substantial, self-reflective analyses. Often, these were mixed with grief. “This is a historic disaster of Biblical proportions,” said Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis.The Democratic Party, as it is, is dead.” But then he grew thoughtful:
“This is a historic realignment. There were Reagan Democrats. Now there are Trump Democrats. . . .The elites of this country alienated voters everywhere because they didn’t want to hear what working- and middle-class voters were screaming for four years—focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump.”
Several Democratic politicos noted that pretty much the whole strategy of the 2024 election was to scare voters about how bad Trump is. But that didn’t land. The general public is not scared of Trump. In fact, for whatever reason, they kind of like him. Conversely, there is something about the Democrats that the general public does not like. Democratic think tanker Matt Bennett put it in marketing terms: “Something is definitely wrong with the Democratic brand.”
And what is wrong with that brand, as Democratic analysts kept saying again and again, is that the party has abandoned what used to be its base and its reason for existence: the working class. Donald Trump managed to pull not just the white working class but much of the Hispanic working class and a good chunk of the Black working class into the Republican orbit. Democrats have become the party of the well-educated, affluent, professional elite, who make up only a small segment of the population. If Democrats are to survive as a political party, so some of these analysts are saying, they must win back blue collar and lower-middle class workers who make up a majority of the population. (See, for example, this.)
What has alienated this constituency, according to pundit after pundit, is the Democrats’ embrace of what James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s success, laments as the “woke era.” That is, the ideological web that consists of critical theory (all social relationships and all of American history and culture are nothing more than privileged groups oppressing victim groups), radical feminism, transgenderism, and identity politics.
I don’t think the ideology itself turned people off so much as the attitudes that came with it. Americans don’t like scolds. Frankly, I think this is one reason why Americans have also been shutting out us Christians. But our elite progressives have not stopped at regular moral exhortations. They exhort us to now accept as moral what we have always been taught has been immoral. And we are not allowed to disagree with them. If we do, since these elites do exercise elite power over us, we can find ourselves censored, silenced, made the target of online mobs, or even fired from our jobs.
As F. H. Buckley says in his op-ed with that title, Voters Reject the Party of Scolds: “One lesson the left should learn from this election is that you don’t win elections by becoming an angry scold. It isn’t patriotic to think that American history is a list of things that should never have happened and that half of Americans are garbage.” This ties in, of course, to class snobbery and condescension, which those on the lower rungs of the class hierarchy keenly feel from their “betters” in the elite circles that have become the democratic base.
A concurring outside perspective comes from Tom Slater, the British editor of the renegade leftist but contrarian online magazine Spiked:
In the end, Biden became America’s first woke president, the capstone of the hysterical, identitarian turn of the cultural elites over the past decade. Those who would dismiss all this as culture-war froth – things that few people notice and even fewer would vote on – would do well to remember that the second most-reliable predictor, after being a Republican, of whether someone voted for Trump in 2016 was if they agreed with the statement, ‘there is too much political correctness in this country’. I dare say few of those voters would feel things have improved on this front in the eight years since.
Well before the election, conservative columnist Rich Lowry was noticing that Kamala Harris was trying to run away from her previous “woke” positions.
That Harris now feels compelled to disavow so many of the ideas that she once embraced is powerful testament to their political toxicity.
An idea has won or lost in American politics when both parties favor or oppose it, or simply don’t want to fight over it anymore. Ronald Regan’s economics truly prevailed when the Democratic Party, via Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans decided to stop talking about the issue. . . .
Harris doesn’t bring up identity politics at all. Not only does she not talk about the once-ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “equity,” she doesn’t even talk about breaking the glass ceiling or the history-making nature of her candidacy. Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin -isms, racism and sexism, have been consuming obsessions of the Left for years now.
Now that Harris has lost the election, the Democrats are likely to cut their ties to woke ideology more completely. Instead, they will try to compete with the Republicans to win back the working class, returning more to the tenets of traditional liberalism (big government social programs, a government-controlled economy, building up labor unions, an evolving-meaning approach to the Constitution, etc.). That will still give conservatives much to oppose. Then again, a return to traditional liberalism might also be a catalyst for a return to traditional conservatism.
Illustration: Winnie the Pooh Eeyore Could be Worse Stickers via PrinterVal, CC BY-NC 4.0
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